1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a recording and reproducing apparatus that is capable of recording/reproducing video/audio data to/from a recording medium.
2. Background Art
In recent years, video/audio recording and reproducing apparatuses have been widely used, each of which has an optical disc such as a DVD-RAM or a recording medium such as a hard disk. The storage capacity of recording media has been increasing, which allows for long time recording of video/audio data.
In general, the storage capacity of optical discs is smaller than that of hard disks. Since the unit price of optical discs, however, is low compared with hard disks, and optical discs are replaceable, optical discs are suitable for data backup.
On the other hand, although the storage capacity of hard disks is larger than that of optical discs, hard disks are not replaceable in many cases. Therefore, if the recording area of a hard disk is full of data, no further recording can be made. As a result, it is necessary to copy data to another recording medium.
For the above reasons, when video/audio data is copied from a hard disk to an optical disc, or the like, if the amount of data to be copied, which is stored in the hard disk, is larger than the storage capacity of the optical disc, the data is copied after performing the step of: dividing the data into data fragments, each of which has the data amount that is smaller than or equal to that of the optical disc; or decreasing a bit rate of the video/audio data so as to reduce the amount of data; or editing the data by a user to eliminate unnecessary video/audio data so that the amount of data is reduced.
According to Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2003-244613, when long-time continuous recording is performed, video/audio data is divided into two or more parts before the video/audio data is recorded.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication Nos. 2004-55010, 2005-182931, 2003-109300, 2005-276389, 2005-318125 disclose methods, and apparatuses, for dividing the storage capacity of a large-capacity recording medium such as a hard disk on the basis of the capacity of a small-capacity recording medium such as a DVD.